Drug WarRant

I upgraded WordPress to 3.5 today, and it appears that the Ajax Edit Comments plugin is not working. It’s sending you a lot of garbage when you comment and then not letting you in to edit (although the comments are actually showing up fine). After researching, I’m finding that others have the same problem.

I’ve decided to temporarily deactivate the plug-in and hope that they get an upgrade to it quickly. In the meantime, I’m afraid you’ll be unable to edit posts after making them, so take a quick extra read before hitting the button.

… oh, and apparently there’s peanut butter on the remote.

There’s a brand new and very worthy organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is dedicated to helping promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government. We accept tax-deductible donations to a variety of journalism organizations dedicated to government transparency and accountability.

It’s incredibly important to anyone looking for accountability in government (which definitely includes drug policy reformers) that we have sources willing and able to publish such stories. The government is increasingly using all kinds of intimindation, especially including cutting off sources of funding, against the publishing of information that is embarrassing. This organization will help get needed funds to useful organizations.

And with Glenn Greenwald on the Board of Directors, I can feel very confident in recommending it.

We’ve discussed Peter Hitchens fairly often, and he’s a bit of a one-note wonder when it comes to drug policy, but his writing is so damned entertaining, it’s hard to pass up.

So you want to legalise cannabis? You must be as dumb as Nick Clegg

Perhaps 15 years from now they will be selling Cannabis Cookies in the supermarkets, and the drug itself will be available at your local corner shop. You can guess which famous brand names will be on the packets. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Let us hope that, at least, the State will by then have built enough mental hospitals to house the poor victims of this squalid drug, the young people who will take cannabis and lose their reason.

But the desire of a few rich cynics for a legal market for marijuana is the real reason for the endless dishonest propaganda on the drugs issue which has fooled so many gullible and ignorant politicians and journalists.

In this unpleasant future, greedy businessmen will make enormous fortunes from the misery of others, and the avaricious State will find a new source of tax revenue, to pay the interest on the vast debts it can never meet. […]

All these people calling for a ‘debate’ don’t really want any such thing. They want to hurry us into legalisation – though they will not call it that, hiding behind such words as ‘regulation’ or ridiculous, unscientific claims that cannabis can be smoked for medical purposes.

Once they have won, it will be incredibly hard to go back. By the time people grasp that legal cannabis has made this a Third World country, stupefied and acquiescent, it will be too late.

It’s not too late now. But it very nearly is.

I always get a perverse kick out of the cluelessness of these things…

Goa’s Sunburn festival to be drug free

Panaji, Dec 16 (IANS) Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar said Sunday he will ensure that the Sunburn 2012 music festival on the beaches of Candolim in Goa remains free of drugs.

The Sunburn music festival is sponsored in part by Absolut Vodka and Tuborg breweries.

So says President Obama to Barbara Walters.

Marijuana Users Not High Priority for President Obama

President Obama says recreational users of marijuana in states that have legalized the substance should not be a “top priority” of federal law enforcement officials prosecuting the war on drugs.

“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Obama said of pot users in Colorado and Washington during an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Barbara Walters.

“It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it’s legal,” he said, invoking the same approach taken toward users of medicinal marijuana in 18 states where it’s legal.

So after a month, the President comes out and says… absolutely nothing.

After all, feds going after users has never been a top priority, because they don’t have the resources to go after that many users. But this says absolutely nothing about distribution methods, or even the possibility of going after some users (it just wouldn’t be a “top priority”).

Now, politically, he could have stated this exact non-policy in several different ways, and they way he stated it is at least positive.

The other thing I kind of liked was one word used here:

“This is a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law,” Obama said. “I head up the executive branch; we’re supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we’re going to need to have is a conversation about, How do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal?”

The word is “yet.” That’s an interesting signal.

Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone

Patrick Leahy Floats Legalizing Marijuana Possession At Federal Level For Pro-Pot States – nice progress to get that kind of gesture from a senator like Leahy, even if it’s of little worth practically.

Nick Clegg: Time to rethink drugs — major move from Deputy Prime Minister

The Real Problem with Fox31 Denver’s Alarmist Reporting About Pot-Impaired Drivers

The ONDCP has been bragging about getting a “Promise Kept” award from Politifact. That is now being seriously questioned. Politifact Wrong About Obama’s Drug War Record

A very powerful piece in the New York Times by John Tierney has really been affecting people. It’s hard to read the story of Stephanie George and not get pissed off.

Mandatory Sentences Face Growing Skepticism

Also, check out this chart, showing clearly how closely tied our increases in incarceration are to drug enforcement (nothing new, but a dramatic look).

Boy, did I just waste a chunk of my life. Wish I could get it back.

Here’s my first mistake: Reading Kevin Sabet’s tweets today, which included this one:

Thoughtful Natl Review piece,Caulkins/Lee: “the arguments for legalization often overlook considerable downsides&risks” http://t.co/yTuaFMMQ

Here’s my second mistake: Deciding to read the piece.

It’s The Drug-Policy Roulette by Jonathan P. Caulkins and Michael A. C. Lee in the Summer 2012 edition of National Affairs (not National Review).

Tnis piece reminds me why I often consider Caulkins one of the worst of the drug policy “academics” cabal in the U.S.

And, I’ve just got to ask, how does someone, whom I assume has advanced degrees, miss out on gaining a basic understanding of analogies?

So, first he hits us with this:

The commission’s advice echoes four decades of arguments by advocates of legalization, who have long promoted their cause as a simple solution to the violence, disease, incarceration, social decay, and other ills fostered by the drug trade. […]

But the arguments for legalization often overlook its considerable downsides and risks. They serially underplay, for instance, the possibility of substantially increased use of and dependence on drugs. Though no one really knows precisely how much drug use would go up if it were legalized, advocates tend to disingenuously offer exact estimates favorable to their cause — suggesting that they can know with confidence that increased use would be limited and controllable. This false certitude neglects the fact that no nation in the modern era has legalized the production of any of the major illegal drugs for unsupervised use. (Even the Netherlands allows only retail sales of marijuana, not production or wholesale distribution.) Legalization is thus a leap into uncharted and potentially dangerous waters.

Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the uncertainty argument that he and his friends pushed in the “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know” book.

How dare we legalizers say we know what will happen if drugs are legalized when there is no exact place in the world that matches the conditions? It’s unknowable, and it’s irresponsible for us to say that we know anything.

And then he proceeds to go on for over 60 paragraphs to tell us what will happen if drugs are legalized. Is he completely irony-challenged?

And, of course, like the rest of them, he never seems to consider that anything other than prohibition exists as an approach to dealing with drug problems.

I recognize a lot of the content of the book in this article, including the infamous “toast” example.

… it has become fashionable for legalization’s proponents to moderate their requests, asking only for “experiments” with legalization. The implicit (if not explicit) promise is that if legalization turns out badly, we can always re-impose prohibition — ending up no worse off, and at least a bit wiser. […]

The concept of reversibility (as employed in the drug-legalization debate) comes from the physical sciences, and has to do with whether an object can be returned to its original condition after being changed by some process. The difference between ice and bread is a good example: Applying heat to ice will melt it into water; removing the same amount of heat energy by putting the water in the freezer allows it to refreeze into the original state. By contrast, when one applies heat to bread, the bread becomes toast. Removing that heat energy by putting the toast into the freezer creates cold toast, not fresh bread. Melting ice is a reversible process; toasting bread is not. The related social-science concept is called “path dependence,” meaning that outcomes depend not only on current inputs, but also on the past history of the system.

Legalizing drugs is like toasting bread: Not all of the resulting changes can be undone by re-imposing prohibition.

No, it’s not.

It’s not even close. Legalizing drugs isn’t remotely like toast and adding a bunch of scientific talk about ice and water doesn’t make a bad analogy work.

Having a baby is like making toast. Once the toast is done and has popped out, you can’t put it back in and make it not be toast again. See what I did there? That’s how an analogy works.

Legalizing drugs could be like opening Pandora’s box. That would be an actual legitimate analogy. Wrong, but at least structurally appropriate.

By the way, that notion that Caulkins derides of wanting an “experiment” with legalization sounds a lot like what I and others have advocated for years using the Justice Brandeis “laboratories of democracy” idea.

An idea that his co-author Mark Kleiman now seems not only to be embracing, but almost ready to take credit.

TCR: In a column you wrote for TCR you mentioned using Washington and Colorado as ‘laboratories for democracy,’ what does that mean?

Kleiman: A lot of voters obviously want to legalize marijuana, but they’re often not very well informed, because we have no idea what the consequences are. There’s only so much you can know about the consequences of legality if all you can study is illegality.

Given that it’s likely we’re going to be changing our policies, it would be nice to know in advance what the consequences are, but it’s hard to do that without actually trying it.

We don’t want to try it at a national level, because that would be very hard to undo if it went wrong. So the place to try is in some district or territory and the whole world can learn a lot from letting Colorado and Washington play their game.

What do you think of that, Jonathan? Is Kleiman making toast now?

Going back to the Caulkins piece, the “roulette” in the title is, you guessed it, another horrific analogy, which he reveals at the end.

Experimenting with legalization is like playing drug-policy roulette. If you have been consistently putting money on black at the roulette table with only mixed success, would it make sense for you to place all of your remaining money on red the next turn and expect a certain win? Of course not. Expecting legalization to rectify prohibition’s unintended consequences without creating any of its own is similarly unwise. Worse, while a roulette player is free to alternate from black to red and red to black, betting on legalization could be an irreversible mistake.

No, it’s not. It’s not anything like roulette. It’s just a bad analogy.

So I’ve decided to title and end my post the same way Jonathan did. With a bad analogy.

The title of this post, of course, is from the description of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from Douglas Adams’ delightful “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s as ridiculous as Caulkins’ analogies, but has the distinct advantage of being funny.

It seems that at least once a week, we hear some breathless announcement that X activity has been found to be linked with Y behavior. Correlation seems to be the social science tool du jour, and the media eats it up.

Why? Because we have all sorts of data, and computers that can sort that data into unlimited comparisons, so it’s easy for someone to just start feeding in numbers and seeing what pops out.

The thing about correlation, though, is that by itself it’s meaningless. It’s a possible indication of an area for further study, but without context it’s useless for making policy. And it certainly doesn’t prove causation.

What’s fun and instructive is to explore some of the strange correlations that exist out there.

For example, did you know that people who have to look at the keyboard to type are much more likely to prefer thin crust pizza over deep dish as compared to the rest of the population?

Why? Who knows. You might speculate that Chicago (which tends to prefer deep dish) has better typing classes in the schools than New York (which tends to prefer thin crust) and that difference affected the overall population. But without further study, you really have no knowledge other than a bizarrely interesting statistic. (Disclosure: I’m from Chicago, can type without looking at the keyboard, and prefer deep dish pizza.)

Studies will also show you that people who don’t like camping are linked with a lesser ability to burp at will, as well as the fact that loving non-fiction books is linked to a likelihood of pigging out when you’re upset, and also that people who prefer soft serve ice cream don’t like roller coasters as much as the rest of us. (10 Crazy Correlations Between Unrelated Things – Business Insider)

So remember when you hear that a new study has conclusively shown that A is linked with B, that only means that someone put some numbers in a computer and looked for any kind of variance they could find, and in this case, 12% of people who did A, also did B, commpared to only 7% of the rest of the population doing B. Those numbers tell you absolutely nothing about why anyone did B.

This is a lesson that reporters should take more time to learn themselves and pass on to their readers.

December 10, 2012: It officially became legal for people in Colorado to possess an ounce of marijuana or up to 6 plants under state law.

Marijuana Legalized in Colorado with Hickenlooper Proclamation

He tweeted his declaration Monday and sent an executive order to reporters by email after the fact. That prevented a countdown to legalization as seen in Washington, where the law’s supporters gathered to smoke in public.